Thursday, December 21, 2017

Are we evoking the 1930's white supremacy with new technologies and new weapons?

This is a time of year when, whether we plan it or it
just creeps up on us, we spend a considerable time reflecting on the past year,
and most likely, the previous years and decades. Whenever our calendar, or
clock, or project, or even our life emits a hint of termination, we are
immediately and acutely awakened to insights, feelings, visions and
disappointments that we may have paid little to no attention to when they poked
their “heads” out of the earth of our unconscious.

Whether we are ten and our hamster dies, and we
desperately want to witness the burial, or whether we are far away when we
receive a phone call that a parent has just died, or whether we are lying in
the emergency room overhearing a doctor whose proximity does not limit the
volume of his voice as he declares to the medical team, “This poor fellow has
Stage 4 cancer and very little hope of surviving!” we are nevertheless poised
at such moments to look in our “inner mirror” with eyes that have changed from
the last time we took this “trip”.

And the repetitive showing of a movie like “The Sound
of Music” replayed every year at this time, is one of our psychic and emotional
bridges that hook our memories into something like a echo experience. Last
night, when CTV re-ran the movie with a very young Christopher Plummer and an
also must younger and vibrant Julie Andrews, this thought jumped out at me.
Although I have viewed this movie literally dozens of times, I have never watched
in times that so evoked the Third Reich as these. The core of hubris
(ultimately insecurity) in the heart of the 1930’s relationship between Austria
and Germany, is a venomous monster let loose today in Washington, Warsaw,
Budapest, Paris, Berlin, Manilla, and even to a lesser extent in countries like
Canada where swastika’s have been cropping up on synagogues in surprising
numbers.

Netanyahu just today boldly declared the United
Nations a “house of lies” in his blatant effort to reduce any negative vote on
the Jerusalem/capital resolution to detritus. Nicky Haley, U.S. Ambassador to
the U.N, declares that trump “takes each vote on this question “personally” as
he threatens to withdraw U.S. aid from any country demonstrating the temerity
to oppose the Washington declaration to
move their embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.

White Supremacy
cells have sprouted in many locations, on both sides of the Atlantic, and on
both sides of the English Channel, as well as deep in the South Pacific.
Racism, in its virulent form, magnetizes both the unstable and the affluent in
numbers and proportions not seen in decades. Laws, and their enforcement, are
unable to ferret out this ‘cancer’ regardless of whether its roots are
Caucasian or not.

National Security machines are built, re-built,
stocked and then reinforced with the latest sophisticated technology which is
only as reliable as those operating it. Law enforcement, it seems everywhere in
the west, is so overwhelmed with drug trafficking, terror threats, money
laundering, and the deep internet’s capacity to subvert many of the best
efforts of institutional law enforcement agencies, that ordinary vandalism is
dismissed as trivial by comparison. And yet, ordinary vandalism is not trivial
to those targeted by the marginalized and potentially unstable perpetrators.

When the “macro” issues on the planet needing
oversight eclipse most of the ‘micro’ issues in neighbourhoods, and when the
people at the ‘top’ of our public institutions repeatedly dissemble, distort
and re-shape reality to fit their personal destructive ambitions as needs, then
what is there to stop the petty criminal from engaging whenever and wherever he
“feels” like acting out? And when the public rhetoric is not merely sprinkled
with racist rhetoric, and lies, but literally saturated with both
“condiments”….the burger is already contaminated, even if the beef passes
muster.

We are being swamped with multiple sources of
political and corporate self-aggrandizement and self-promotion all of it
reeking of the poison of narrow, narcissistic ambition and hubris similar to
the “supremacy” contempt held by the Third Reich for the Jews. Of course, there
are already howls of protest from the peanut gallery about the apparent link of
corporate greed and self-promotion to white supremacy and anti-semetism. While
current journalism practice would not likely make such a tenuous connection,
there is a kind of self-centred “bubble” that exclude anyone who if different
and threatens the maintenance of that bubble. And if corporatism is not
rampantly out of control, then how would it be characterized accurately?

When fox news
airs words like these, “Robert Mueller and his team are engaged in what amounts
to a ‘coup’ of government,” you know that there is literally nothing stopping
the ‘hate speech’ and the ‘lies’ that history demonstrates complete the formula
for the gas that fueled the furnaces of Auschwitz and Dachau.

I do not believe that hyperbole is the antidote to
white supremacy, nor to racism or any sort. However, given the whisper of
protest we are listening to about the dangers of any formal or informal meshing
of the neo-Nazi gangs and the Islamic terrorists, plus the not far-fetched
potential of either chemical or nuclear weapons “falling” (perhaps courtesy of
North Korea) into the wrong hands, (and there are hundreds of loose nukes in
places easily detected by those determined to use them)….and the conflation of
bad and good people among KKK and white supremacists and their protesters as a moral equivalency by
trump (Charlottesville, remember?) gives both cover and encouragement to those
already deeply brain-washed by such hate-mongering.

Right wing political parties have secured a growing
percentage of the popular vote in European national elections, and the
continuing tide of refugees from Syria, Libya, Somalia, Mali, Nigeria and
Afghanistan will keep the pressure those
far-right parties want to support and impose on their receiving governments and
people. Returning ‘trained’ combatants who fled to fight for ISIS also pose a
threat the relative potential of which is quite difficult to calculate, and that
threat could emerge on an street or subway in any city in the world, just as it
did in Melbourne Australia earlier today (authorities have not specifically
linked the accused to a terrorist cell).

The deliberate withdrawal of foreign aid from the U.S.
administration’s strategic thinking also opens several doors to other countries
like China, Russia and India to flex their muscle and exert pressure through
dollars and diplomacy in nations profoundly in need of fiscal and planning
support, as well as the kind of support that works to reduce corruption, a
plague in several African countries.

Awash in lies and deception, the swirl of private
money evading legitimate taxes in many countries, the potential return of the
arms race (arms being the cornerstone of the trump national security strategy)
the wet-noodle strength of international agencies like the UN, and a rising
tide of virulent racism and nationalism are already brewing on a planet whose
temperatures are rising…..

Does anyone else think this might just be a potential
political/economic/military/health/disease/security/climate volcano of the
size, destructiveness and unpredictability that could overwhelm current
international capacity and interest to address its ramifications?

And if the “thing” explodes, we can be assured that
those who already consider themselves a ‘superior’ race will have no empathy,
compassion or tolerance for those they see as the enemy.